those over eighteen years of age are sent to Magdebourg; at Ghent, the
very young or those not fit for military service are put in Saint-
Pelagie; the rest, two hundred and thirty-six in number, including
forty deacons or sub-deacons, incorporated in an artillery brigade,
set out for Wesel, a country of marshes and fevers, where fifty of
them soon die of epidemics and contagion. - There is ever the same
terminal procedure; to Abbé d'Astros, suspected of having received and
kept a letter of the Pope, Napoleon, with threats, gave him this
ecclesiastical watchword:

"I have heard that the liberties of the Gallican Church are being
taught: but for all that, I wear the sword, so watch out! "

So behind all his institutions one discovers the military sanction,
the arbitrary punishment, physical constraint, the sword ready to
strike; involuntarily, the eyes anticipates the flash of the blade,
and the flesh is feels in advance the rigid incision of the steel.



VIII. Administrative Control.

Changes in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. - Motives for subordinating
the lesser clergy. - The displacement of assistant priests. - Increase
of episcopal authority. - Hold of Napoleon over the bishops.

Thus is a conquered country treated. He is, in relation to the
Church, as in a conquered country.[94] Like Westphalia or Holland,
she is a naturally independent country which he has annexed by treaty,
which he has been able to include but not absorb in his empire, and